I would say I have a hardware issue...

[DrEvyl666]

But I'll let you decide through the use of video...


Okay, here's me doing "Epic" and failing out of the song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm9YM4R-qKw

Now here's someone else getting a 98% rating and 232K points on the song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQrHRSCFVlc



Here's me getting 3 stars and 34K points on "Vasoline"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xlgm032KhA

Here's someone else getting 5-stars, 100%, and 112K points
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xV_A2CYvkJA


Can't find someone else doing this song... but this is me doing War Pigs and failing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHGLjZx1-B8


Now I'm not saying I'm an amazing vocalist, but I do think I can say with a fair amount of confidence I'm singing the song better than either of these guys. If we were all auditioning for a band, I would say you'd have to be crazy to pick the highest scoring performances here for your new lead vocalist.

From what I've experienced, I've watched the little arrow that tracks where your pitch is bouncing all over the screen when I'm singing a steady note... and there's times when I'm singing the song nearly perfectly that I see ratings of "Weak" and "Messy", and watch the meter plummeting.

You can also see in the videos that it works sometimes... just not all the time.

So what do you think... do I have a hardware problem, or do I suck and not realize it?

[Fish Face McGee]

Well, I see you're playing it on a computer monitor. Are you using your 360 through a TV Tuner?

[Odwill]

Your a good singer no doubt about it bro but the performance the game is looking for is not what necessarily sounds good to the ear. First I would make sure you adjust for lag in the setup options if you haven't already. There is bound to be some lag running through a PC tuner card. Second lay of the tremolo in you voice when singing. Trust me, it totally screws up what the game is looking for. It kind of sucks that you have to tone down your performance to get a good score but you do. That is all I can think of man, good luck.

[DrEvyl666]

Your a good singer no doubt about it bro but the performance the game is looking for is not what necessarily sounds good to the ear. First I would make sure you adjust for lag in the setup options if you haven't already. There is bound to be some lag running through a PC tuner card. Second lay of the tremolo in you voice when singing. Trust me, it totally screws up what the game is looking for. It kind of sucks that you have to tone down your performance to get a good score but you do. That is all I can think of man, good luck.

I would think if it was an issue with lag, I'd fail out on every instrument... but I can 5-star it on expert on guitar and drums both with this setup, and especially considering that this is purely audio.. hard to imagine how lag would figure into it. I've gone in and looked at the lag adjustments, but every time it comes up dead on.

I dunno if I can sing the song wrong to pass it... LOL But if you watch the video, you can see there are spots I'm not using tremelo on my voice, and am hitting the song pretty close to dead on but the meter still drops after the phrase. It seems really silly that singing the song badly would score higher.

I also think that someone at Harmonix / EA was a little sadistically demented in that they programmed some of these songs so you have to start singing the next verse before the last note of the previous verse finishes (like the "Yeah, yeah yeah" part in Epic, and then leading into the next verse), and that they change the scrolling speed of the "percussion" parts on you during the song if you run it on "static" lyrics instead of scrolling - that sometimes makes it almost impossible to hit them correctly.

In regards to the setup... My XBox is connected directly to the computer monitor using Microsoft's VGA adapter kit, and the audio output plugs straight into the computer speakers.

My next experiment is going to be to try using a different microphone and see if it has any different result.